Spike Lee is a spellbinder. I got wrapped up in my conversation with him at the Toronto festival, after the premiere of “Miracle at St. Anna," which opens Sept. 26. This is a very lightly edited transcript, with my questions removed to capture Spike's voice.

TORONTO, Ont.--When he was a kid in Brooklyn, Spike Lee said, he and his brothers loved war movies: "Three little boys, so it was fun to see the Germans get shot and blown up and stuff like that. But even as a kid, I knew that black people were involved in the war because my father’s two older brothers were in World War II."